Patch - pre-alpha 0.5.3.2


Your very own dragon - this probably the most important aspect of Draconia. You create one, level it to raise it, go on adventures with it and explore the world!
But this very first part can be rather overwhelming to newcomers. Here I teach you everything you need to know to bring your very own little beast to live!

New options like more horns, warpaints and more will be added with/after the character creators overhaul later down the road. It is very likely that old characters won't be compatible after than, causing a server and ssingle player wide wipe. Be aware of that, save your colors and patterns once we get a proper announcement! :)

The first decision for the character creation is also one of the most difficult for some of us: what species do I play as?!

Draconia provides 6 incredible main species to play as for different playstyles. From the small Yggaron to the elegant Yamati and the powerful and iconic Vodros. I'll leave you the list from my Beginners Guide here and mark what's not playable yet with the little star*.

Main Species (4 of 6)

As you see, each species comes with its own flavor of elements. With the future taltent tree, this will be adjustable to a certain point.

Appart from these 6 beasts you can also pick the gameplay wise more simple wildlife creatures and become an angelic kirin or a griffin and bring nightmares into dragon nests!

Wildlife Creatures

Every creature you may pick to play as comes with currently 1 to 4 skin patterns to choose from. Sometimes they can be combined for even more unique looks!


Araya here uses pattern 4 for the body and pattern 2 for the wings.

Main Species

Wildlife Species and new models
For the wildlife species and reworked models, they all have the same eye patterns and one single skin. This will change sometime with or after the release of CC2.0, more on that below.


When you think a pattern will fit to what you want your character to look like, you come to the real magic.
Every color field of the patterns can be colored separately with a color wheel, allowing a great variety of designs! By hovering over the color boxes, the connected areas on the creature gets highlighted. Clicking on them shows the color tool.

4th colorpart highlighted







When hopping in, you may see many people with glowy colors. While the character creation doesn't support a real glow effect (exception: Yggaron accessoires), manually raising the RGB settings above 1 oversaturates the color. This provides a beautiful bright color!
Changing the R value from 1 to 10 turns this orange color into lava-like patterns, perfect for fire dragons!

To give your character some more personality, take a look at the lower left of the screen. You find 4 symbols representing the 4 main parts of the creation: Skin, Attachments, Accessoires, Warpaint.

You are free to choose in what order you take a look these when creating a new beast, I personally go all left to right and switch many times. I spent hours in this screen after all! :P

In the attachments section you can add different types of horns to your dragons head and nose, spikes to the cheeks, neck, back and tail and a new tail tip.
Different species provide different attachments, the griffin for example lets you change the beak and tail or add cute ears.

Over time, more things will be added. So don't worry if the perfect set of horns or ears is not available yet!

In the next section, you may add little details like pearls to the Vodros' tail or parts of the legendary ancient bone armor set. But be warned that not all things here are fully colorable. My loves flowercrown may be a little tricky to handle.

Lastly you try yourself in the more tricky part. Adding warpaint looks simple and definitely can be, but once you start with the blendmodes and more it can quickly turn into a mess. Take your time with it!






You can add a pattern to the warpaint for better characteristics to it. 20 noise patterns add a very specific style to it, so don't be afraid to play around for a while.














Happy with your new friends' design? Let's move on! :)

As the last step to finish your character, you can name it and add a title if you desire.
If you have troubles with the name, you can click the symbol next to the name plate a few times to generate names until you get an idea or find a fitting one.


The title list is HUGE! Many of them will be locked at first to be unlocked in Quests or other actions once the game releases.
While many titles are brought to you by backers, none is exclusive to anyone or hidden behind an additional pay wall.

There are currently over 140 titles to choose from in game (counted 149 in pre-alpha 0.2.08).
















Lastly, you may want to play your new character on another server to show them to friends and take on a new adventure with them. But they are server saved, so what to do?





To copy and paste a characters look (not progress!) to other servers, click the scroll symbol next to its name in the character list. They way you get a string code, which you'll have to import into the new server. To do so, join in an hit the small "import" button right above "new character" and paste the code to the lower line. To finally play, enter the name or a new name in the line above the code and hit import. Now you got a copy of your previous created beast in another place!

This way you can also import characters made by other people. The Draconia Community decided to use justpaste.it to save and store characters for others to use. The Discords #character_library channel is a collection with links to pretty beasts from talented and creative players.

You're probably wondering where you choose between male and female. The answer is simple: you don't!
In Draconia, the question of male and female is purely a role-playing question, which simplifies the later aspect of young. So it is theoretically possible for everyone to care for offspring with everyone, without getting annoyed that both players play male or something else. Also, this way a certain openness towards the LGBT community is wanted and given.









Once created, your creation is not fixed. Almost everything can be easily changed and customized later. There are 2 exceptions to this: The species and the name. To change these, a new character must currently be created, which may change for the name in the future.

The Character Creator is about to receive a massive rework. This is required to allow more options for our characters and fix some current issues.

Sadly I cannot give much info on what the CC rework will bring, but I can tell you this:

• Piebald option for every species
  
• Changing bodyparts instead of whole models
  
• Changing vocals to a certain degree
  
• Unlockables to farm and flex with

All these things have already been communicated publicly at some point, but not much.This is partly due to the fact that a few details still have to be finalized behind the scenes and some things should simply remain a surprise for us.

The pictures I have used here have been posted on either their official social media accounts or the public channels on the discord.

This rework will also change how our characters are saved, ending the "name is taken" era and fixing the lower cave names that bother some people in the player base.


On the other hand, we will have to say goodbye to all our current characters. They will not be compatible with the bigger backstage changes, such as those regarding the saving.
Additionally, all old models will be removed with this release because they are not made with all these changes in mind. The newer models are, meaning we will be able to perfectly recreate our current Fyrrwins, Ka'sai and new Yggaron.

So be prepared and write down your favorite characters color codes (the current character codes will no longer work)! You can do so by hand in a note book or use documents on your computer, phone, whatever you like.
I have set up a google document With the codes and screenshots. :)

As always, I'll drop you the important links below:

• Official Draconia Discord Server[discord.gg]
  
• Official Draconia Trello[trello.com]
  
• Fanmade Draconia Wiki[draconia.fandom.com]

When joining their Discord, make sure to check out the #info and #work-in-progress channels for more interesting links and a good look at what's cooking in the dev kitchen!


With the character creation getting more love, I decided to separate it from my Beginners Guide in advance. New additions like the new upcomming models and swapable body parts will be added here once they arrive to the public build.


I hope you found this guide on creating a beast to join your journey in Draconia informative. Making these guides is to much fun to me. :)

Here is a list to my other Draconia 101 guides:

• Draconia 101 Guides (Steam Group)

Thank you for reading and stay hydrated!